Regard a coffinnail
by brombones
Summary: Title: "Regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery." By this very definition, I was not lonely. I was confined to a sea of our memories, on a lifeboat mildewed with afterthoughts, and barnacled with that last searing image of finality.


**Regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery**

1891

It was my first Christmas spent without him in many a year. Should not this mean I be lonely, miserable, and disconsolate? I was all but one of those three, as the essence of loneliness does necessitate the feeling of solitude. By this very definition, I was not lonely. I was confined to a sea of our memories, on a lifeboat mildewed with afterthoughts, and barnacled with that last searing image of finality.

The horizon was a dull blueberry color. I had every direction through which to go, three-hundred and sixty degrees of freedom. I sat upon the endless sea, rocking like a pebble in a paper boat in a pond I remember from my youth in Derbyshire. If the wind would but push me with a heaving gust… but there was no wind, and I was breathless.

No compass existed that could direct me north-by-northwest. For once, it was my decision alone, and I floated there on those still, deep waters, anchored by the presence of a specter that was not ephemeral and translucent but so solid in body and image that I might have mistaken him for a fellow passenger on this unexpected voyage, if I did not know better.

But my wife would give me solemn looks confirming those three aforementioned traits, concern tracing extensive pencil-thin lines over her forehead. Holmes would say that, one day, this is the place she is going to grow ugly, and undoubtedly she would give him a swift reprisal in return for the remark.

People usually could not understand the way Holmes gave compliments, and so he, like the beleaguered beagle rapped on the snout, grew accustomed to the predictable response. I stopped feeling sorry for him like he stopped, if he ever had, feeling sorry about my leg. Some lives are accompanied with inconvenience by avenue of their doubtful duplicity. I understood that about him and remembered long nights laying sick in India, dreaming of my demise.

I would turn my head, skin yellowed by the sun and the enteric fever, and glance through the open-air window up to the blanket of stars. They were bullet holes. Each one the inimitable mark blown out by a great man in the fabric of time, disturbing the course of history with humanity's messy, miraculous ingenuity. I had always dreamed of meeting a great man.

The delicate hand to the fabric of my shirt, weighed down by the heavy engagement ring he had given us, awoke me from the momentary departure. Where I was going I could not say. I was following the tendrils of a ghost who had long since vaporized from the rooms. I did not look for it, but it was simply there. Waiting behind reality like shadows to a light. I felt chill in its wake.

Mary said something to the effect, rubbed at my shoulders and disappeared for a moment only to quickly return with my caramel-colored jacket, the one with the dark fur rimming the collar like a Cossack. I had once thought only Holmes to be unwittingly daring enough to succeed in such original fashions, but a lot does change when the energy to accept or dismiss societal convention seems excavated from the spirit. For me, all my precious artifacts had been mined, and I wondered what other trinkets could still exist in me after the pyramids had been crumbled back to grains of sand.

I wondered if I could see my ruins exhibited in our British Museum; but they never show those kinds of stories in the glass cases for children to marvel at. They only show that which they know they can trump, that which they succeed over- that which lays steps behind. Holmes and I would make our beloved England bronze over, or garner green like copper left out in the English rain.

A doctor colleague of mine, a kind, affable chap with the demeanor of a pastor and a feminine, kindly voice, reminded me, finding me leaning breathlessly in the corridor of the surgery, that sometimes those that grieve morph into the ones they love. Wishing to pull them so near from the transient layers of time that they grow more like them in an effort to have close that which they never again will know.

It simply felt like a jacket to me, but my feelings were very much extraneous to me in these days, as if someone else were having them entirely, and I was simply watching and following along with some semblance of the correct actions. I was a delayed moving picture, the puppet of a tired master. Very much in black and white.

It took me a moment to remember the coat was not chosen randomly out of a solid number of items to warm me, but for a precise reason. I had an engagement tonight, with my wife, to attend the very first screening of a moving picture in London.

Mary held fast to my arm as we maneuvered our way through the clogged arteries of graying London. The burning blazes atop candlewicks in every window offered a pathway through the cold and clouds, and the Christmas bells on the streetlamps glimmered the gold reflection of those meager flames, as if attesting to how brightly they could gleam were they but given the chance.

Bells jangled cacophonously on horses' harnesses as hooves slammed the streets like cannonballs, people pushed one another, gifts in hand. Children raced through our legs, chasing one another, following the warming scent of roasting chestnuts and pine. It felt like a battlefield of sorts. The kind of space not meant for two people walking alongside one another, but for one leading and the other quickly covering behind. I lead Mary through and passed St. Bart's church, a choir could be heard inside and a woman passing out laurel leaves on the doorstep said she would pray for me, God save her.

We arrived, women removed their furs and the white seats of the theatre were covered in jackets and pelts and gloves. The entire place seemed far too antique and serious for a motion picture, but nothing new was ever built here and so the archaic was forced to coexist with unforgiving reality. Mary tugged my hand.

I looked over and she whispered something, that clever, beautiful smile upturning bow lips and I had not heard what she said but offered the smallest of smiles in return, which seemed to make her happy. I could feel her eyes on me as I looked away, and I would never insult her by not giving credit for her sharpness.

I looked to the screen as the lights dimmed, satisfied with my anonymity in the dark and the need not to socialize with any other patron, as would be required during the intermission of a play. Holmes would say this is the perfect atmosphere, not only for spying on the voluntarily hypnotized, but to display the deepest desires of the human condition. To live in another world entirely, an altered reality where one could choose that which they had not; to be surrounded by others, experiencing this life not alone, but also shielded by the dark where no one could read our inconsistencies.

It was difficult for me to imagine the man I had once known to be amongst the bravest and wisest not granted observance of each day that lead us to the turn of the century. Not privy to the emerging technologies that seemed to me so remarkable. I tried to appreciate them more ardently for that fact alone.

He would not be there to smash champagne glasses that final night in 1899, small body covered over in a black jacket that hugged his form like fur on a cat. He would not be dragging me into some murky swamp far from any civilized crevice of the world in the search of some inevitably wicked foe the instant technology beckoned us into a new era. He would not turn to me and quirk, "Happy New Year," as Chinese stars rattled overhead and henchmen descended upon us seemingly leading us to the beginning of our end.

I heard the clicking of the motion picture film. It was more soothing that a clock, less grating. I could see time disappearing in here, in this cool, dark haven. But I was hardly moved by the adventure on the screen. Perhaps if I had never seen a waterfall before, the scenery would have shifted something inside.

I could picture him there in the seat next to me, dark eyes glued to the story on the screen, the tale displayed so insultingly below his intellect that it would probably delight rather than disgust him. The white flashes of light sporadically illuminating and then darkening his features like the light jutting through the windows of a locomotive. The dark indents on his mouth and the inquisitive roots growing out from the corners of his eyes, borne from years of suspicion and deduction, would turn to happy incarnations, making the lines seem like from a man who was always jolly, scrunching in appreciation of each juvenile jest. He would glance over to me, slicked hair held in place at my bidding, and tap my hand once with his. A smile.

But the train passed in one giant, monstrous, mechanical rush. And the seat next to mine was empty. No matter how long I looked, no one was there.

"Are you happy?" the flashing words read across the screen, I saw them from my peripherals.

The two characters stared at one another. Made-up mannequins of film suspended in scratched, colorless reverie.

"Are you as happy, right now, as you would be on your honeymoon in Brighton?"

My heart sank as I turned to the screen, eyes roaming over and over the black and white words. They twisted my soul like they twisted my mind and I sat with my fingers curled over the armrests.

The second character turned to the first. He moved his mouth, but no words came out. The silent film had me tortured, waiting for the next moment for the words to appear. To tell me the right words. Tell me what I should have said.

But the film snagged. It leapt ahead what seemed like several scenes in a technical error the staff would later apologize for. It was the very first showing. Mistakes had to be expected. Still wasn't it a splendor?

Later I asked Mary about the scene, walking side by side with her on the pavement. She had not recalled a scene of that nature, and I sighed, fallen victim to the theatre and its balming trickery. I suggested we head home, woozy from the blurriness of the day alone. The carolers serenaded us with Adeste Fidelis, but they were missing the pealing, pleading notes of the violin to make each musical syllable heartbreaking in its entreaty.

I watched the pavement pass under my feet, and the grey, clotted sky hanging behind the ashen silhouette of London's smudged buildings and dilapidated rooftops. We walked past a man of the most impoverished nature, filthy and shadowed by the coughing cinder chimneys outside the baker's warmly lit kitchen. Moved, perhaps mechanically, by the season, I stooped to drop him alms.

"Happy Christmas-," he mumbled appreciatively, dark eyes avoiding mine. He fingered the bottom of my trench and I pulled away from him. Refusing to see those dirty hands as practical replicas of the soot and ash covered digits of my long lost friend, frozen to the icy riverbeds. I refused to hear the murmured, "John" that trailed that festive statement, in the voice so similar to that of Holmes.

I could hear Gladstone barking uproariously in the window of our rooms, anticipating our arrival.

"Drive yourself onto ont'the streets with generosity like that," he commented sarcastically, tipping his chapeau-covered façade up barely enough to make out his jaw line, shaking the tin cup.

"It's Christmas, not Kingdom come, old sport, " my tone was derisive in defense, as if I had every right to be insulted by my own wealth and his own poverty. I did not feel rich, and marveled at the thought that those coins would have a worth enough to pay off purgatory.

Later on, I stoked the fire in our parlor and I sat in the familiar position with my chair turned just slightly, on an angle towards the fireplace. Mary sat across from me and the candles on our tree burned warmly in the window. I picked up Dickens' definitive tome, turning to the first stave. It was all so perfectly quiet, easy enough for a picture, and so similar to all the scenes in the ads for Christmas goods in the papers.

As I read through the introduction, my eyes played games with me. Holmes was dead: to begin with. I blinked and rubbed at them. Old Holmes was dead as a door nail. It was several long minutes I stared at the page, unable to erase the image of the name, unable to halt my wishing that I might ingest some poisoned piece of potato and see his countenance once more in some unseemly vision.

I, like Scrooge, longed for Christmas past, and smiled warmly at Mary when she looked up from her needlework.

I slept soundly through the night. No ghosts to wake me and take me back. No revelations to change my future. The dim sounds of Mary and our housekeeper returned my mind to the permanence of reality as I lay in bed.

The ghost smoked his pipe in the corner of the room. Merry Christmas, I offered. I spoke it to the ceiling, to no one. To him.

No one answered, of course. Like a child you realize all over again that ghosts are only really there if you believe in them.

That's the heartache of it.


End file.
